Fortifying your relationships trumps just about everything else when it comes to sustaining growth and building successful partnerships. Consider these points to strengthen your relationships with your most important stakeholders, beginning with you.

When crafted well and used correctly, Rules of Engagement can help you manage your business profitably, as well as deliver partner and customer satisfaction. Indeed, Rules of Engagement bring order to your channels’ universe and shed light on what your partners can expect from you.

It’s inevitable, somewhere along the way partnerships encounter roadblocks and speed bumps that get in the way of forward momentum. While day-to-day partnership challenges can be distracting, many of them are not worth the excitement they generate. So, it’s critical that you have a way to prioritize the issues most important to your partner’s growth with you, much like you do with customers.

Emerging growth companies seek partnerships often to associate with a well-known brand or a big fish in order to lend credibility to their own company. Sometimes, however, there’s such a mismatch in company values, the partnership results in frustration, wasted time, and damage to the emerging company’s own brand in the process.

The most successful companies understand that partner recognition and support is not an isolated event or commemorative jersey. Instead, it’s woven into the fabric of company culture and business practices.